Tuesday, 10 April 2012

The Girl Who Waited

Now this is much more like it. A massive improvement
on McRae’s (and RTD’s) reintroduction of the Cybermen in season
2. If the last episode was a Missing Adventure, this one is a
New Adventure, with a fallible and morally ambiguous Doctor once again
acting in a highly questionable and manipulative way in relation to
his companions. Some won’t like that and some won’t like another
timey-wimey plot, but this was a proper and necessary examination of
our three regulars.

Amy and Rory once again suffer because the Doctor
gets things wrong. He doesn’t intend to do so, but that is scarce
consolation to Older Amy or Rory. Rory has to choose between the
Women he loves and the woman he loves and Amy and Amy have to decide
which of them is to die. All the time the Doctor is lying to them
all. This is pretty dark and heady stuff for a mainstream Saturday
evening audience and it speaks volumes that the show is able and willing
to take the risk of going into this territory. The New Adventures
swam these waters regularly, but its arguable that the TV series has
not presented us with such a difficult position for the regulars since
the ‘60s.

Older Amy is beautifully judged by Tom McRae and Karen Gillan.
She is “the same but different” in just the same way that we are
all the same but different to our younger selves. Her refusal
to assist her younger self and sacrifice herself is completely in keeping
with the selfish streak that runs through Young Amy, but with an extra
helping of bitterness and scepticism. This is an Amy that must
have some understanding of Rory’s endless waiting and it is no coincidence
that she naturally falls back into her relationship with Rory in spite
of her own best efforts not to do so. Tellingly, she does not
fall back into the relationship with the Doctor. It is open to
interpretation as to whether she actually believed that the Doctor could
find a way of the two Amy’s to co-exist or if she ultimately decided
to sacrifice herself for the sake of Rory.

Rory’s understated decency in this episode is a
wonderful. You could see him settling down with Older Amy in an
alternative ending. He cares about whether she is okay and he
cares about the prospect of loosing a life with Amy, but it is obvious
that he is not about to dump Amy because she has piled on the years.
His condemnation of the Doctor is pitched perfectly too. The Doctor
spends his life having to make awful decisions; it is an inevitable
part of his lifestyle and consequence of his own life history.
Rory sees this because his is in the TARDIS for Amy, not for the adventure.
He has every right to call the Doctor to account on this, particularly
as he had already raised the risk Amy is subjected to in Vampire of
Venice. The Doctor is found profoundly wanting for a good reply
to Rory’s indignation.

All of which brings us to the Doctor himself.
The Eleventh Doctor shown here harkens back not to Troughton but to
Hartnell and McCoy at their most callously alien. It is evident
from the get go that the Doctor is aware that a choice will have to
be made between Older Amy and Younger Amy. It seems equally clear
that the Doctor decides very quickly that the survivor must be Younger
Amy. The Doctor’s actions throughout the rest of the episode
are calculated to manipulate the Amys and Rory to achieving this end.
On the one hand this is a logical and “necessary” decision to make.
Both cannot survive, one must live to the exclusion of the other.
Older Amy’s life appears to have been pretty awful and traumatic.
Younger Amy can have a happier, safer life with Rory. The survival
of the Younger Amy would correct the Doctor’s mistake also.

Against all of the moral issue that Older Amy is the
original time line. Younger Amy’s life requires a re-writing
of the time line with the effect that Older Amy will effectively die.
Older Amy clearly sees enough worth in her life to want to carry on
living. In no way can it therefore be said the Doctor has made
the “right” decision. There is some sense of the Doctor
realising this himself in attempting to “give” Rory the choice,
but for the feeling that in doing so he is attempting to relieve himself
of responsibility for the choice.

Looking at the more superficially aspects of the episode
for a “cheap” “Doctor-lite” show, this has some fantastic
design work. The Handbots are as effective in their own way and
environments are the arty robots in The Robots of Death. Some
of the CG was really beautiful, albeit reminiscent of Tim Burton’s
Alice in Wonderland film.

The only thing I can really hold against the episode
is the same problem as The Girl in the Fireplace. It is not really clear
how the multiple linked time streams should really work and they fail
in precisely the way needed to ensure the story takes place. But
some dodgy technobabble is easily forgiven when it allows for the innovation
of a such an excellent tragedy.